How many of Peter Thiel’s 7 questions does your business answer “yes” to?

How many of Peter Thiel’s 7 questions does your business answer “yes” to?

Peter was co-founder of Paypal and Palantir (which is now worth $20 billion), he was first to invest in Facebook and his VC company, Founders Fund, has used these 7 questions to invest early on in companies like AirBnB and Stripe.

It’s also the same 7 questions that his fellow entrepreneurs who made their first fortunes with him from PayPal’s $1.5 billion sale used when starting their next companies.

As Peter says about the ‘PayPal Mafia’ : “Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley , and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each.”

Answering “yes” to a few of these is the difference of growing a small business and a million dollar business. Answering “yes” to all of them is the difference of a million dollar business and a billion dollar business – and impacting millions of lives.

Take a moment with your team and ask yourself what you can do to improve your own answers to these 7 questions – to maximise your potential for growth, and minimise your risk of failure.

And if you only have time to look at one, look at the last one. The “Secret Question”.

As Peter says in his book, Zero to One, “The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”